Sharon Seligman

After selling her company in l996, Seligman pursued her long-running interest in photography. It was her personal confrontation with breast cancer in l995 that was the catalyst for her shift from the business world to one of making documentary storytelling images.

Her self-portraits during cancer treatment phase proved both therapeutic and revealing. Those highly personal images set her on the road to photographing and interviewing other women with breast cancer. This, in turn, led to her first real body of work, "Bearing Witness, Beyond the Surface of Breast Cancer." The project has received grants and a fellowship, as well as sponsorship by Blue Earth Alliance. The work has been widely exhibited and selected images were included in the show "Tea Time: Images of Women," a 20th anniversary exhibition by Women in Photography International, and featured in Visual Communications Quarterly.

During her frequent travels between Texas and Mexico, Sharon encountered a community of indigenous people, whose livelihood consists of capturing birds and other wildlife and selling them along a two-mile stretch of highway in the high desert region of Central Mexico. Over a 4-year period, Sharon has developed a relationship with these "bird people," who've been supporting themselves this way for some five decades. Sharon finds a parallel between the wild creatures and their captors; both are captives of their circumstances.

Sharon's work has been exhibited by Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, and selected images were chosen as part of a traveling exhibit of the photographic works of ten Texas female photographers, called "Inside Outside," a 25th anniversary celebration of Women and Their Works, Austin. Anne Tucker, Gus Wortham curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Clint Willour, director, Galveston Arts Center, curated the exhibition.

Photo:
Baby Owl, 2002
Silver gelatin print